I use EAC in secure mode to rip WavPack images, one file per disc with cuesheet, for my archive. I then use foobar2000 to convert the WavPack to MP3 (LAME 3.98.2 -V2) for use on the PC/iPod/Streaming to Xbox 360. I have foobar2000 replay-gain scan output as albums during the transcode and use MP3tag to convert the replay-gain values to SoundCheck values for use with iTunes and iPod.

P.S. I switched from 128 VBR iTunes AAC (QT v7.2). I don't think the new iTunes/QT AAC encoder sounds as good as the previous version at bitrates < 192 and I needed the compatibility of MP3. I do miss the small files, as my iPod would sync a lot faster and hold a lot more.

EDIT: I use iTunes to grab album art. If it's not in the iTS, I check Amazon.com. If all else fails, I scan the cover myself.

Advantage of single songs: Easier search and find in your collection, eg. by program Mpeg Audio collection MAC 2.93.1, or comparison of different editions of same/similar albums.Because EAC appends the gaps to previous track, you don't miss anything in the songs or "gaps", also perfect gapless playing is standard since ages.

1. FLAC -8 (bitrates around 700 - 1000 kbit/s) HiFi listening purpose, no compromise, the Exact Original CD !It offers hardware support, think of devices for streaming in the house, from PC/HD to HiFi stereo in living-room. EG. EVA 8000 Netgear hardware and many many others.FLAC will be built into more and more hardware.Also: great decoding speed, independent on the encoding compression level.Still good encoding speed at -8 (8=best compression level), even at P3 @ 800 MHz.

2. MPC -q8 --ms 15: bitrates around 260 - 270 kbit/s small-sized archive backup quality, if you have FLAC Lossless already, but good compromiseA long time reliable fine-tuned lossy format. Good encoding and great decoding speed.

Today: 1000 GB HD at 90 - 100 Euro prices, so no question of storage space/place or costs.Also DVD+R storage is a possibilty and even cheaper.

See www.High-Quality.ch.vu for High Quality Audio Archiving Tutorials/guides , I hope to update it soon, if I find time. But those guides already offer now a lot of pictures and you will get the idea of configuring EAC to FLAC , or foobar 2000 etc.

100 DVD+R Verbatim at 23,30 Euro , not at 40 like Martin F calculates in his example.So, there is still a small price advantage for DVD+R than to HD.Of course, like I wrote, at these times, HD is together with DVD+R a good alternative for storage space.

Martin F's arguments about replaygaining or tagging on DVD+R is a non-argument imo.

Those are done before burning to DVD+R.Afterwards I simply listen to music and don't think about replaygain or tags.

Replaygain of Lossless Flac is nice to have made and to get an impression, if the music was mastered too loud/compressed or not, but not necessary, as there is no danger of clipping introduced by lossy encoder.

In fact, you can replaygain Flacced HDCD or DTS-CD , but applying it during playback would destroy the original music, in case of DTS even to annoying noise.

2. step: multiple album replaygain by foobar 2000:2.1 After having ripped several CDs, I drop those album directories of FLAC to Foobar2000 and carry out album replaygain for multiple albums.2.2 After having ripped several CDs, I drop those album directories of mpc to Foobar2000 and carry out album replaygain for multiple albums.

3. Scanning album art3.1 Album art is scanned by Irfanview in 300 dpi jpg compression 90% (minimum 80% , 95% or even 100% jpg seems like waste of space, so 90% is a good practical high quality thing. Also more than 300 dpi (eg. 600 dpi take 4 x space than 300 dpi scans) seems like waste of space or time, because already at 300 dpi you win bigger album art than included into the original CD ! , a magnification of the texts or pictures !) The directory of the scans is the FLAC album folder.3.2 Copying the extra files like EAC logs and album art jpegs from FLAC folder to the mpc album folder. As mp3 is only for fast food listening during sports running outdoors or in car on SD-card, no album art or small files are copied to mp3 albums, also no replaygain or mp3gain.

4. step: Independent Storage of those albums in 3 formats:4.1 Burning / Copying several FLAC and/or mpc albums to DVD+R/HD, taking care, NOT to have same album in FLAC AND mpc on SAME DVD+R or other media/HD.4.2 Burning / Copying mp3 albums on DVD+R / other HD

Result:

1 album is stored on 3 different media, be it 3 different DVD+R or HD.Of course, due to good long-time stability of optical quality media ! (Tayo Yuden or Verbatim, eg. both priceworthy to buy from Damrotech), I got a safe storage or backup of the album and can forget about the original CD.Interesting is the bitrate/quality strategy:1. FLAC 700 - 1000 kbit/s as Exact Original CD2. mpc q8 --ms 15 at 260 - 270 kbit/s vbr as small sized cheap backup for the original Flacs3. mp3 lame at V5 at 120 - 150 kbit/s vbr for fast food listening, outdoors, portable 2 GB sd-card, sports or cars.

The addition of space / bitrates is per album smaller than the original waves at 1411 kbit/s !

Today: 1000 GB HD at 90 - 100 Euro prices, so no question of storage space/place or costs.Also DVD+R storage is a possibilty and even cheaper.

From what I have seen at price comparison sites, the prices are about 40 € for 100 DVDs. Costs per TB: 1000 GB / 4.7 GB * 40 € / 100 ~= 85 €. There are rare exceptions with half the price. Comparing to HDDs with 1 TB for ~73 € or 1.5 TB for ~110 €, I would clearly buy a HDD. HDDs are very fast, quite reliable, small, silent, easy to use and rewritable! So even if you found cheap DVDs for 0,20 €, that advantage is gone if you want to update you tags (e. g. if you forgot to apply replay gain). Also it would be quite a lot of work to copy all files from the 212 DVDs to a HDD, apply replay gain and burn 212 DVDs again (in the worst case only to realise you made a mistake again ). If the files are on a HDD, one could simply let foobar2000 do all the work (album gain per folder, for example).

After considering it, I decided that I didn't want to mess with my cuesheets, so I fired up Cueproc (a wonderful tool) and split my entire collection into individual .wv files during an overnight job. Stats:

236 cue+wavs turned into 2,921 .wv files.The cue+wavs use 122GB of disk space where the .wv files use 76GB.Using -x2, it took five hours to create and wvgain all the .wv files.

I'm pretty happy now that I have everything set with RG values. I don't see how I listened without it.

I voted Vorbis (aotuv at q6) & flac here since that's what I rip to now.

I was a Musepack holdout until last year when Audiosurf came out and could play oggs. I've mostly switched over, though I only re-ripped cds when they had stuff that I wanted for audiosurf. So I still have a good amount of musepack around.

I hope ogg support continues to get more universal. It's nice to be able to show people your music without telling them they need to switch to a new music player.

Most of HA's members know the reason why they prefer some particular formats. But in real life people even don't know or don't care about alternative formats to MP3. It wouldn't be an exageration if I think that MP3 userbase is higher than 90% (outside of HA)

Many friends of mine who have iPods and iPhones (even some electonic lovers and geeks, students and already ingeneers of electronic and/or sound ) don't know about AAC and less about its efficiency.

MP3 (LAME 3.98.2 -V2) for listening on PC. One file per track.Monkey's Audio (Extra High) for archiving. One file per album + cuesheet.

MP3 will be my choice for "almost transparent" encodings until other codec reach the same compatibility than it. For "medium" [-q0.35] or "streaming" [-q0.2] encodings MP4 without doubt. Ogg is good but anyway at any quality below q6 it sounds worse than MP3 e MP4 to me, but love how it sounds with "classical" music (that is only 2% of all my music!). Musepack no way, only sounds transparent to me at high bitrates (256~320 kbps). WMA (in all versions) with MP4 on the way are useless. About Monkey Audio i'm thinking to replace it with Wavpack but how start everything from the begining isn't a short way still with it (something about 200 GB, that compressed with MP3 give me 43 GB).Keep in mind it's only my opinion...

I'm using lossless FLAC for rare CDs and audiophile stuff, though I'm really liking TAK and might use it once it's open source.

LAME -V3 for everything else. I don't like the bitrate bloat due to sfb21 issue when using -V2 (especially on rock/metal), plus as listening tests showed -V5 is transparent on most material so -V3 should give a nice safety margin.

I really would like to use AAC, but since there is no good open source implementation there's no way in hell I'm using it, what if Nero some day decides they're stopping the work on their free encoder?Same goes for Vorbis, although it's open source, if it wasn't for ayoumi we would be stuck with the same encoder for years.

I would probably still be using MPC if there was any significant progress, but ever since Frank Klemm stopped development I had a short time of using Vorbis and then went back to MP3, as the format has just gotten "good enough".I feel there are a lot of people still caring for MP3 quality and developing LAME, and I don't think this is going to change too soon. With disk space becoming cheaper and cheaper I can't see widespread success of any other lossy format, expect perhaps for AAC.

I really don't know if this is the third time i'm posting! but my ISP is only giving me trouble today!!!

Oh well, anyway, I believe it's choices have changed a bit for me since last year:2008 was my OGG Vorbis year. now I'm no longer using Lossy, though I voted for AAC, since i have a Sony Ericsson Walkman Series Mobile phone, so in the rare cases when i actually use it as DAP, i use AAC encoded with Winamp's MP4/aacPlus encoder, too bad Walkman does not support Vorbis

for Lossless though, my fav was Monkey Audio in 2008, encoded @High, but after a few *counted* errors i faced with tagging them, I'm currently using FLAC -6 (v1.2.1) in 90% of the cases (for it's excellent compatibility with everything! should use -8 anyway now!!!), Monkey's Audio 4.01 @High comes second, and third is WavPack 4.50 @-h... I'm also open for any other Lossless encoder, considering TAK as well...

files are ripped and Cue sheets are made with EAC v0.99 prebeta4, it gave no trouble yet, and i always test & copy, CUE sheets are included always with lossless, not included with lossy as they're always transcoded from lossless source, using single file or multiple tracks depending on each single album... no specific reason to use any, just what i feel is fine

Most of HA's members know the reason why they prefer some particular formats. But in real life people even don't know or don't care about alternative formats to MP3. It wouldn't be an exageration if I think that MP3 userbase is higher than 90% (outside of HA)...

Exactly, I would say 94% mp3, 5% wma and 1% songs bought through iTunes. At least this is my impression of the people surrounding me. The poll results will show >1% usage of formats ogg vorbis and mpc but none of my surrounding people have ever heared of these codecs.

I'd like to add that thanks to CorePlayer Mobile and my Symbian phone (Nokia 6220 classic w/ 4 GB microSD card) I'm switching from LAME MP3 to WavPack lossy for portable use too, though still need the former for car stereo playback and when bringing music to parties.

Most of HA's members know the reason why they prefer some particular formats. But in real life people even don't know or don't care about alternative formats to MP3. It wouldn't be an exageration if I think that MP3 userbase is higher than 90% (outside of HA)

Many friends of mine who have iPods and iPhones (even some electonic lovers and geeks, students and already ingeneers of electronic and/or sound ) don't know about AAC and less about its efficiency.

As iTunes uses AAC by default, also a lot people use AAC without knowing its advantage. Same thing for WMP-users who didn't change the encoder to MP3 because also WMA plays fine on most devices.IMHO MP3 usage isn't thaaaat high (not over 90%) in the "real world".

I really would like to use AAC, but since there is no good open source implementation there's no way in hell I'm using it, what if Nero some day decides they're stopping the work on their free encoder?

Excuse me... where's the problem here? I don't think what you are saying is a good reason for not using AAC. First, what do you mean saying "no good open source implementation"? An encoder? Since the latest and current version of Nero produce very high quality encodings for me i don't need another and the developers are here hearing us (like Lame MP3 ones) when we find problems updating it. Anyway, most important of all, it is also not the only AAC encoder available, so, even if some day they stop to work on it there are always the others implementations like CT, Apple (free too)...